JamesBranam's Blog

AWS Experience Part 14: Cloud Watch in AWS Management Console

Hi all,

This is another episode in the Amazon Web Services series. This time I'll talk about Cloud Watch. You say you don't know what Cloud Watch is? This is what Amazon has to say about its new product:

Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides you with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you’d like to monitor; within minutes, Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools.

Those of you who are used to using AWS will notice that there is a new column for images: Monitoring. The default is set to disable, and to enable monitoring via Cloud Watch, right-click the image and choose Enable Monitoring, as seen in the following image:

Amazon promptly warns you that this will cost extra. Click Yes, Enable.

Then you get a message saying that it's working.

I plan on playing around with this a bit in the next few days. I'll write more about this as I find our more.

Cheers!

--James

Posted at 01:42PM Sep 24, 2009 by branajam in Sun  |